The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

100 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 way of creating and communicating one’s sense of self”(5). He gives no statistics to prove this point and no scholarly studies to support this claim. This is true for many of his facts in this article. Thus I am left to depend upon his ethos to decide whether his facts were accurate or not. However, Deresiewicz uses pathos well in this paper. He uses personal examples of his student and what he was told by a relative of a teenager to prove his point(1). He also uses pathos when he argues that there is a similarity from his generation’s development of boredom and the current generation’s development of loneliness(4). He gives the personal example of his development of boredom as a child and how he now has to fight the constant impulse to do something as a result of this thought pattern. He then likens his attitude toward boredom to the attitude many young people have towards loneliness(4). This was a strong parallel and argument, and thus is a strong use of pathos. Deresiewicz also used pathos well in the overall tone of the paper. He plays on the human tendency to grieve over what is lost, and to try and gain something good gone bad. Throughout the whole paper he proposes that we have lost something of great value, which leads the reader to fear the current state, and where we are heading if nothing changes. Thus as the reader travels through the arguments, the reader is pulled to an emotion of longing for what is lost, a dissatisfaction over the way that things are currently, and a fear over what is coming. This especially comes when on the fifth page of the article Deresiewicz asks the question of “losing solitude, what have they [we] lost?”(5) He then goes on to list the things that according to him, we have lost when we stopped valuing solitude, and replaced it with loneliness. Deresiewicz also used pathos strongly when he used the metaphor of his generations like of television to produce boredom, and this generation’s use of technology to produce loneliness. This argument helped the reader to clarify and understand and identify the thrust of his argument, through this analogy. Also, throughout the article, he uses repetition in the lists of names that he uses to back his historical claims. He uses these names and references to compare their opinions and to refer to pairs of friendships that he contrasts when he talks about the different periods of time. These lists of names help the reader to understand what he is saying about